Island of Thieves by Josh Lacey Page A

checked if it fitted, then chucked it out and grabbed another sheet, not bothering to stop and worry about trivial matters like the identity of the Captayne and who might have written these words.
    I knew I should be reading as fast as him. I didn’t want to be killed by Otto. But I couldn’t help lingering over the words. In fact, I found myself going slower and slower, reading further and further down the pages, finding out more and more about the voyage of the
Golden Hind.
    Like I already told you, I managed to daydream through an entire year of British history. But, somehow, without meaning to, I was getting interested in what I was reading.
    It was the journal of a man who was sailing across an empty sea. Each day he wrote down a few facts about the weather and the ship’s position. He didn’t have much else to say. Maybe there isn’t that much to say when your view is always the same: waves, waves, waves, and yet more waves, stretching in every direction. There were some names—Gregory Banester, John Cotton, Thomas Southern—but hardly any personal details, no interesting conversations or exciting incidents, none of the stuff that you’d get in a novel. I had to imagine it all for myself.
    I found a page almost entirely taken up with a description of treasure stolen from a Spanish galleon: a chest packed with gold, another stuffed with silver, five different types of cloth, a crate of fruit, a bag of fish, a bag of bread, a bag of salt, and a barrel of “rhumm.” They kept all the gold, ate the bread, and drank the rhumm.
    I thought about this little ship sailing up the coast of South America, looting towns and other ships, and I suddenly understood why they would bury eight chests of gold and silver on an island. They were like thieves who broke into a house and found more money than they could carry home. Their boat didn’t have enough room to fit all their loot.
    I must have read fifteen or twenty pages when I found one that really intrigued me.
    The writer was still aboard the ship, but now they were moored near land. He described going ashore with the captain—“our Captayne”—and catching fish in a river. Then this happened:
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As we were thus busye we chaunced to espye a greate crocodyle in the water, whom we besett with our nettes but coulde not take hym. At lengthe, after much beatinge up and downe after hym, we sett upon hym, some with calyvers, some with fyshgygges, some with speares and others with swordes. At laste Mister Doughty caste a fyshgygge in hym under the hynde legge whereat he gaped with his mouthe which was monstrous to looke upon. My couzen beinge ready with his calyver shott into his mouth. The pylot shott in his legge. Dyvers stroked hym with swordes and with pykes tille he was ded. After we kylled hym we broughte hym to the Pelican, where he was opened and flayed and my couzen, the Captayne, did order hym skinned. Tonite we dined on crocodyle. The meate was bitter and not worth the effort of findeing.
    I had two thoughts immediately. The first: what on earth did “fyshgygge” mean? The second: I knew the name Pelican.
    But why? Where from?
    Pelican, Pelican, Pelican.
    Pel-ic-an.
    Pelican!
    Thank you, Mrs. McNab. All those hours hadn’t been in vain. When Francis Drake sailed from England, heading toward South America, his ship wasn’t called the
Golden Hind.
He changed its name later, halfway round the world. No, when he left England, he was aboard a boat named the
Pelican.
    The evidence was mounting.
    I read the page a second time and noticed something even more interesting than the fyshgygge or the
Pelican.
    My couzen, the Captayne.
    My cousin, the captain.
    I was just about to tell my uncle what I’d found when he clapped his hands together and started singing, “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest!”
    â€œAre you feeling all right, Uncle Harvey?”
    â€œYo ho ho and a bottle of